Webinar: KPI Dashboards made easy

WEBINAR: KPI Dashboards made easy

Learn how to create cool dashboards like this!

Full Transcript

Good morning. Thank you everybody for joining our webinar today. KPI dashboards made easy. My name is Tucker Johnson, managing director of Nimdzi Insights and I have a few house cleaning items before we get started here. Today is all about learning empowerment and learning how we can easily create something that might seem a little bit overwhelming at first. If you take nothing away from this webinar today, I want you to take away this idea that I can do this. It’s not as difficult as maybe it, it seems, it could be. If you’re joining us live on one of the many platforms that were streaming on, then you can, if you have questions throughout this process, please go ahead and leave those questions and comments sections. While you’re joining us, feel free to like and subscribe to our various pages and channels that you’re tuning into.

And just FYI, I am flying completely solo today, so please bear with me as I go through the technical transitions. I’m not only presenting this webinar and running all the technical behind the scenes and I do have some support on, on our social channels. Sandra will be collecting the comments and questions from you guys today, so a little bit just to get started about myself here. Um, as I mentioned, my name is Tucker Johnson. I am currently the managing director of Nimdzi insights and a little bit about my experience just to qualify myself here. I have about a decade of experience mostly on are pretty much exclusively on the language services provider. The LSP side, a lot of my time spent on that side has been working on large scale localization programs with large clients. I, I based here in Seattle. So a lot of the big clients which you can imagine that are based here in Seattle.

I, I’ve worked on, um, I cofounded Nimdzi insights where I’m currently at with my partner Renato Beninatto and we’ve been going here in 2018. We’ve just gotten started and we’re going strong and it’s been a lot of fun because we basically, it’s our job now to learn and to research and to share that knowledge with other people in the industry, which we’re very excited about. I’m a little bit more about myself though, is that I want to make it very clear. I want to make a point that I’m not technical. I am not, I don’t come from an engineering background or development backgrounds. My background is strictly project management, program management, account management. I’m not certified in PMP and scrum. I’m six sigma. Um, I, I can’t code. I can fake my way around some html, but that’s about it. And the reason I want to bring this up is because what I’m going to be showing you today, um, I want you to take away from this, that if this guy can do what I can do it.

So if, if Tucker who doesn’t come from a technical background and doesn’t have the experience, can do all of these things, then certainly it’s something that I can do as well. Um, today’s goals are pretty simple. We want to, I basically want to show you and empower you how to create really nice looking, attractive and meaningful data visualizations that you can share with your stakeholders. Either your internal stakeholders, your external stakeholders, which would be your clients, your vendors with data that helps you and your vendors and your clients and make better business decisions. Now this data can be collected from various sources. As we’re going to see a. for the sake of this Webinar, we’re going to focus on one source in particular because it would be a whole series of webinars if we wanted to go into everything, but it’s going to give you a good picture of what can be done with the data sources that you have.

And to start off, we’re going to start talking about how to collect and maintain and store data. And we’re going to use the angel example of the tracking sheet. Now, this might not be very popular. Tracking sheets are not officially in style anymore because there’s all these cool new tools that track track information and project status, um, in real time directly in the tool. But in my experience and the experience of others that I’ve witnessed a lot is that none of these have fully replaced the tracking sheet. Even if folks are using a really great tms that has great tracking and reporting abilities somewhere in the back end, it’s not uncommon to see a project manager or a localization engineer using a tracking sheet to track the information themselves, so we’re going to start off with that and then we’re going to move on to how do we turn that tracking sheet, that information that we’re tracking into a beautiful data visualization that can be shared with folks and that’s the exciting part of and the sharing is going to be very quick.

I want to show how you can. You can post this in in different formats so that it can be accessed by multiple people. Now today, this Webinar’s going to be a little bit different than a typical webinar. We’re not going to be A. I’m not going to show you just a bunch of slides. I don’t have a 50 slide slide deck that I’m going to go through. I want it to be very hands on, so to speak, so I’m going to switch over and I’m actually going to show you this process and we’re going to walk through it. I’m hand by hand in hand, side by sides, and you can see actually how this is done in real time. So with that it is dental and I will just switch on over here.

Awesome. And I believe everybody can see my screen. I have a, um, an excel sheet or a google sheet open here. And before we get started, this is just a basic template that I put together ahead of time. Before we get started, I wanted to talk about spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are a very, very, very powerful tool and I’m going to say it multiple times, so, so get ready. I’m going to say it multiple times in this webinar that one of the best things that any project manager, program manager, account manager, doesn’t matter who you are, one of the best things you can do for yourself is teach yourself how to use excel. And when I say learn how to use excel, I mean really, really learned. Go deep. Learn how to use some complex formulas, conditional Florida automatic data visualization. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, learn how to create some macros and some automation in excel.

It’s a very powerful tool and this what I have here today is not an excel sheet as you can see it as a google sheets and I’m an excel guy. I’m a Microsoft guy. I’m here in Seattle and I resisted transitioning to Google for a very long time. Now we’ve set up nimsy and I’ve set it up all on the g suite, the google ecosystem. So it was a little bit of a scary transition for me because I’ve been using Microsoft my whole life. If that’s you, you are intimidated by google docs and Google sheets because you’ve been using word and Microsoft Excel and all of these other options out there. Uh, I want to tell you it’s not that bad. It’s a pretty seamless transition. And what I’ve found is google sheets can do pretty much everything that excel can, especially now that they have a record macro function, but we’re not going to get into that.

Um, and even some more stuff that, that excel can’t. So I encourage you to make the transition. Okay? So what we have here is the basic outline of a tracking sheets. And this is a project status and offhand back tracking sheet. So this is something that I would use if I’m managing projects to to track the status of projects. No, you see I’ve already filled it out here, but I want to talk about before you create a tracking sheet, what you really need to do is ask yourself the question, what data do I want to track? What data do I need to track? And also put yourselves in the shoes of your stakeholders, either your clients or your vendors and think what data would be useful for them to see or to have access to. Because I’m not a proponent of tracking data just for the sake of tracking data.

I’m, I’m a big proponent of tracking data that’s going to help me as a manager make better business decisions or that’s going to help my clients make better business decisions. And if it’s not something that’s going to help me make better decisions as a manager, then do I really need to track it? Because there’s always a cost to tracking and maintaining data in that either as manually inputted or someone has to create. An automation to fill it out if it’s not manually inputted. So really ask yourself that question. So for this, I want it to be able to track number of words, so the volumes of the handoffs, I wanted to be able to track the finances so I have the rates column, the cost column over here and I want them to be able to track on time deliveries. So I have the handoff dates, hand back date.

So the scheduled when it’s supposed to be handed back and when it was actually handed back. Nope. I also need to think what am, what components, what dimensions do I want to be able to filter this data by? Do I want to be able to understand the cost by language, by project type, by individual project. And I need to add each of those in here too. So for this simple spreadsheet, I’ve added content type as an example. We’re going to use to marketing and Dui. So two types of content. I’ve added language and I’ve added project name. So another thing I want to mention is that in this type of spreadsheet, this type of tracking sheets that I’ve used in the past, each row is for a separate language. So if we have a handoff, let’s say sample can doff and this is going be a, I’m typing here marketing project, it’s going to be Spanish and it’s going to be 200 words and I can go down the list here and if this handoff also includes friends than I’m actually going to create a separate line for this.

So same project names, same content type and French, maybe friendships do 105 words. Um, why it seems like, like common perception would be one row for one hand off and have multiple languages. Um, and it’s a very simple answer because this is going to be an easier format for my data visualization tools to read and to understand and if I really want to be able to slice and dice the data and all the ways that I want to be able to slice and dice it, this is the best way. So a couple things here, I want to go through here, just some really quick best practices when putting together an excel sheet and then I want to move onto the fun stuff, which is the data visualization. So first of all you’ll see here, I’ll be honest, I did this on purpose, I misspelled Spanish.

So this is a big problem with tracking sheet, especially if they’re shared sheets that are being modified and updated by multiple different people, is that if, if I put Spanish in here and it’s spelled wrong than the. When I visualize that, it’s not going to understand that that Spanish is going to understand it as spend city which is different from Spanish. So that’s going to throw everything off. So the first thing I want to talk about is these data validation rules. Very simple, very powerful things though that you can do. And this can be done in excel, it can be done in google sheets. So I want to limit this language field to only four possible options and I want to create a drop down to select from that. So what I can do here is I’m going to remove both of these languages to lead that.

For now I’m going to pick my languages. Um, I actually already had these languages over here in this price sheets tab you see here, I’ve created this price sheet. We’re going to use this for another reason too, and I have my list of languages right here. So when I go back here, I’m going to go to my data, it’s the same in excel data field. And then I’m going to drag down to data validation and I want to use a list from arrange range. It’s the same option in excel and for that range I’m going to simply select from my price sheet here, these four cells, and you see it fills in in the price sheets. It picks the right tab and everything. And if someone enter something wrong, I can either show a warning or I can reject the input. I’m just going to reject the input because I don’t want anything in there.

And I’m going to hit save. So now you’ll see when we go back here and I have this cool little dropdown that has my list of languages and what this is going to do, it’s going to pretend it’s going to protect my data. I’m the point of this is making this as idiot proof as possible. And as you can see, I just drag that down. Um, so that it’s in multiple roads and if I go in there and I tried to enter a language that’s not in there, let’s say I’m Dutch ope, I get an error message. So it’s really going to protect it, protect my data in a way that’s very important when it comes to visualizing it. Always, if you can idiot proof it for, against yourself, against anybody else who’s touching the spreadsheet, always, always, always, always do it. Um, I’m not going to get into it right now, but another very powerful thing to do is to use the protect cells function.

If their cells, particularly with formulas in them that you don’t want people touching, then use the protect sheet and put a password on it so that people can’t modify those cells. So that you can’t modify those cells. Now the next thing we’re gonna look at is this rate column here. Now I could go on and fill in this rate manually, but you want. Remember, you want to remove as many manual steps from the process as possible for two reasons because the more manual steps you have, the more time it takes the human being, which is not inefficient use of humans time and also the more manual entries, data entries that you have, the more likelihood that someone’s going to introduce an error. So I want to create a formula that automatically pulls this rate based upon the language because I have that information over here and my price sheet tab, so let me put these languages back in here and French and German will use French and German and this is, it’s called a v lookup formula and one of the best formula is that a project manager can learn.

If you’re. Remember when I said learn how to use excel, start with the V lookup formula. There are other more complex options out there that solve the same thing, but this is a simple to get your head around. So I’m going to use Equals v look up open parentheses. The first field is I want to see which field, um, which value I want to look up. So I want to look up that. I want this to look up the French language comma. The next one is where is it going to look this data upfront and it’s going to look it up for Mike Price Sheet Tab. I told you we were going to go back to this and I want to look up from ds a rose or these columns here and I want to. It’s going to automatically look in the first, in the first column here for French, and then it’s going to return the value from the rest of the colon or from the other columns.

So I put comma into my formula here and now I’m going to put the number of the column, which it’s going to return the value from. And it’s called them too, because language is column one per word is column two, two comma, and this last one is a true or false value. And the difference is I always put false. The difference is does it look up when it’s looking for the value doesn’t look up approximate matches or only exact matches. And I want only exact matches. That’s why we have that data validation in place. You don’t want approximate matches because Brazilian Portuguese or ptp our pet pet are very similar and it might call the wrong information. So I’m going to put false and um, I close my parentheses. Now I’m going to hit enter and mice, you see my formula is automatically pulling twenty cents. And the, I just paste that down. It’s going to pull the correct information for, for other columns here. And let’s just add one more row here. For illustrated purposes, we’re to change this to Spanish and she pulling a different value for Spanish. So very, very interesting, very powerful. I can then go over here to costs and I can show the full cost for this by using a much, much, much simpler formula equals rate times, words and fantasies.

Whoops. I forgot apprenticing with Cedar.

I don’t even know why I added parenthesis to begin with. And once again, why am I using like a formula and I might want to protect these cells to protect that formula. I’m using a formula here because the fewer manual cells you can fill in, the better. You want to have as many formulas as possible. Um, another note here before we move onto the next thing that I want to look at is perhaps you’re getting this data where it counts or languages or content type. Perhaps you’re getting this data if you’re maintaining this tracking sheet from a different source. So a common source would be a log file or word count file. Export it from a tm or our tms. So let’s say I’m using Trados and I the word count analysis, and it gives me a CSV file with particular columns. I’m going to, if that’s the case, I’m going to set up my tracking sheet in a way that mirrors that.

Why? Because then I can very simply copy the whole table out from my CSV, which is exported from Trados and I can paste it into here. If I want to get really fancy, then I create a macro or a script that in automatically pull that data into an excel sheet and I don’t even have to do anything. Maybe I click a button to run the macro that’s outside the scope of this webinar today though. Another thing you’ll notice is I have these cells formatted in a certain way, so these are formatted as currency cells as is this column over here, these handoff dates. I want to make sure that these are date formatted in sheets. I can do that simply here from my my menu bar and I can select date and one reason it’s important to format everything correctly is because when you pull this into your data visualization tool, then it needs to know what type of data it is and if you format it as a date, it’s going to help your data visualization tool better understand.

Remember machines are smart, but machines are also very stupid so you have to kind of spoon feed them and make sure that everything is. Everything is the data is clean for them. So, so far we’ve talked about V lookup formula is learn how to use them, make sure your facilities are formatted correctly, used formulas wherever possible, as little manual input as possible. Now, rather than filling out the rest of this spreadsheet, I’m actually going to go over here to the spreadsheet that I’ve already filled out before this webinar. It’s like, it’s like one of those cooking shows where they put it in the oven and then they say, oh, and here’s one over here has already completed. That’s what this is. So I’ve already filled this out. Um, I’ve got my project name over here and each project is either marketing or uni, got my languages, my words, my rates are automatically being pulled from the rate sheet, tap my hand off dates.

These are manually entered. So that’s going to be a pain for the project manager. If there’s a way to automate automatically pull that data from a tms export or something, that’s definitely something to look into. Over here. I have the actual hand back date and the time for the on time I um, used another formula which if there’s a second form or maybe a formula you should actually learn before fee lookup. It’s the if formula. So what I’ve used here as if the hand back, the actual hand duck date was after the scheduled can date, then it’s late, or if it’s not, then it’s on time. So one and zero for four late. You can see this one is here. Another thing that’s very cool to use and I don’t have it set up here, is conditional formatting. And what conditional formatting would allow me to do is, for example, highlight if this handbag date is after the scheduled and backdate, I could highlight this row is red, which give me a very clear understanding.

This is conditional formatting if you spend a lot of time and tracking sheets is very important in large, large, large tracking sheets because there’s so much data you want an away too easily, visually identify with where your problem areas are. And if that’s a problem area, I want to highlight it red, I can do that with conditional formatting. Um, so that’s about the scope. I could talk about tracking sheets for a long time, but that’s about the scope of what we need to cover today in order to get into the next step, which is, how do I visualize this data? Um, this is a hand off, hand back, like project status tracking sheet and the financial tracking sheet. It’s a combination there. This is very simple though. You can have many different columns, different ways to slice and dice the data in here. Um, you could also have lqa quality data if you’re running an Lq way program and you have the different types of errors and cervarix and error types that can all go and do a tracking sheets or a separate track and keep the same tracking sheets.

So really the sky’s the limit. The idea here is you need to get the data into an organized manner and make sure it’s clean. Make sure that it’s idiot proof and your data validation rules are in place because this is what’s going to power our next step, which is creating the visualizations. Now, if you’re using excel or, um, one of the things, the easiest things to do would be to use excels built in graph builder function and that can create graphs based upon the data in the excel sheet. And that’s fine. If you’re comfortable with excel, um, or you for it security reasons or whatever, can’t use google sheets, then that’s fine. You can create really cool dashboards in an excel. Um, you can even put them on a separate tab and you could share that excel. You can put it in a shared location.

Um, so that updates in real time, um, and that’s what I did for years until I made the switch to Google. And you can also use different data visualization, like the standards, like I always think of Microsoft power Bi and tableau. Those are the two that come to mind when I think of data visualization. There’s another great options. I know Domo is great as a million connectors, but if you search just google search, tablo alternatives, you’re going to get a list of 20 different data visualization suites out there that you can use with google sheets. So I’m going to show you the one that I know which is a product called data Google data studio, and it’s in the same ecosystem as the sheets. So it works very well. And let’s make the switch over to that. So I already have a dashboard set up here which I created ahead of time and I want to start with this because I want to show you.

This is, it’s called the super awesome demo dashboard because I’m awesome at naming things and this is, I’m going to scroll down here. This is what you can expect to be able to create from that excel sheets, something like this. You see, I have breakdown by word counts, breakdown by spend, cumulative totals over time. I can create stacked bar graphs, pie charts. There’s all sorts of different charts and graphs that I can visualize and hear. Um, the sky’s the limit, just not as I would say, powerful as tableau or power bi. It’s much, I would say more user friendly, um, as, as is often the case with google products. Maybe it’s not the most powerful option out there, but it’s more digestible, more easy to use, and work syncs with more things I would say. So this is what we can expect year. Um, I have my graphs. Go Up to the top here. You see these, these are filters. So I can filter this data if I want to see only the data for a certain time period, I can start, I can select that. Very powerful. I can see it by individual projects.

Um,

all my star wars themed project names. And then I have picard down here just to mess with you. Ocd Star Wars merits, um, language. I can look for a particular language, I can look for content type. Um, let’s. So let’s just check this out really quick. Um, if I unselect Ui

then

it’s going to only show me the marketing. So you see here, this graph is just solid marketing because what this graph was showing was a breakdown between Ui and marketing. So how do we create this? Um, well, we start with data studio. So let’s open up. Um, I’m just gonna go right here. No, I’m going to go right here because I have a bookmark for it and in here you’ll see all my old data studio projects, but I’m going to ignore all those. I’m going to ignore these templates. You can certainly use the templates if you like. And I’m going to start a blank report. We’re going to start with a clean slate here. So I’m going to click this plus button right here and forget the loading times. I am streaming on multiple, uh, services and got all sorts of stuff. My Poor Wifi just doesn’t know what to do,

but that’s okay. Okay, so I have a blank report here, I can name it, um, weapon, our demo report. Sure. Good enough. Over here you see all of the data sources that I’ve created. These are for other projects that I’ve used. Um, but I want to create a new data source, so I’m going to go down. You get to the very bottom and click this button that says create new data source. Then I’m going to wait for it to load. As I said, it’s moving a little slow today, kind of cranky and I want to spend some time on this screen right here because this is really interesting to me. It’s all of the different connectors and this is one of the reasons I really liked data studio, all of the different connectors that data studio support. Now of course we’re going to use this one down here, Google sheets because that’s where our data is, but if you see here we can connect to anything if you’re. Especially if your company’s in the Google ecosystem. So like if it, like nimsy uses google behind the scenes to power everything, then this is extremely powerful.

You see Google analytics over here, if, if your company uses google analytics to track website visitors or conversions, you can sync to any data in Google analytics, which if you know, Google analytics, you know, there’s a lot of data collected in Google analytics. Uh, if you’re running a youtube channel and you want to use your analytics from youtube, you can connect to that. And why is this important? Because this allows me at my fingertips. I have access to all of this data and as I said before, I don’t want to go on data overload, but I, I want to use data that allows me to make better business decisions. So let’s say I want to track the Roi on my latest email marketing campaign that I’ve localized into multiple languages. Then I can pull data from Google analytics that shows me website visitors from local markets.

I can pull data from mailchimp if, if I use mailchimp, uh, for my email campaigns to show subscriber rates, open rates, uh, um, stuff like that. And I can pull data from my tracking sheets that show how much everything is costing and I can actually get a, a in Roi, see how much money I’m spending to localize the campaign into French and how many visitors that’s getting me, what is the conversion rate on that. And if I assigned particular values to conversions, then I can actually get a good roi on that. So very cool. And I’m going to scroll down here because this isn’t everything. This isn’t all I’m, I’m, I’m, I can’t talk about each one of these connectors. I’m okay. I’m going to talk a little bit about. These ones are really cool. These are from a company called super metrics. It is a third party connector ended this pate on a subscription basis.

So not everything in here is free, but what these do is it pulls information from social media so I can track how my brand is doing online, my, my social brand, um, and see how that’s doing compared to maybe my competitors. Um, so very powerful. I’ve used that for a little bit, but then I didn’t want to pay for it. So I stopped using it, um, side note, google sheets also can scrape a lot of that data without a third party connector. So I can scrape data directly in Google sheets using fancy formulas, complete tangent. We’re not going to go down that rabbit hole right now though. Um, you know, it does play nice with bing bing ads. So if you’re a Microsoft date, like I was then don’t be afraid of Google data studio. So all of these things here, this is very cool.

So a lot of open source connectors down here on the bottom and I can connect to any of these and I can actually have multiple data sources tied to a single data dashboard if I so desire the one that I’ve shown you and the one that we’re going to build right now, there’s only going to have one data source because that’s what we have time for. So as I mentioned for this, Oh, and of course there’s always the old fashioned file upload. I can upload a CSV file. I used to use this when I was first learning data studio to train myself on it. But um, but I don’t like about it is once the file is uploaded, you can update the anymore. So it’s not real time reporting, it’s just creating graphs of data that you already have. So you’re missing out on the big value add of Google data studio.

Um, of course we’re going to use google sheets for this one last comment though, in case I haven’t clarified this before. Google data studio, this comes with a google account. I’m logged in with my [email protected] because that is a google g suite account in the back. Like I said, we use this g suite in the back end at here at MC. Um, but you see I have, if I click over here of all my other accounts that I’m logged into here, my personal one, um, so if you have a gmail account, if you have a google account, you can access this. If you don’t have a google account, then you probably do have a google account one way or the other. If you have a, if you sign into youtube, if you have a youtube account, you have a goofball accounts. Um, Google it, it’s ubiquitous, it’s not just email, it’s email, calendars, youtube, Google plus, and they’re all linked together.

So chances are you probably already have a google account even if you don’t know it. Um, alright, so enough gushing over all these cool connectors. I’m going to go down here, then I’m going to select google sheets, select, and here it’s going to show me all of my. I like this about the google sheets. It shows me my recently opened, worked on Google sheets so I can select which one I want. Um, and then I select which tab I want to pull the data from and I’m going to pull it from this filled out. Um, filled out tab here. Use first roses. Heteros guests include hidden and filter yourself. Yes, I want to do that because I do actually have some hidden itself in there that I will show you and I can connect up here in the corner. Now, this screen basically says, remember when I said the machines are smart, but they’re also kind of stupid.

This is the machines, the machine google saying, okay, here’s the data that we saw and here’s what we think it is, but I want to go through and modify this because it does a pretty good job of getting it right, but not always. So these green ones, here are the different dimensions that are available. Dimensions are usually text based fields and there are the ways that we want to slice and dice the data that doesn’t actually contain numbers and values. It contains waste. We want to slice and dice it, so things like project name, content type language, these are all the dimensions. Now these blue ones are the metrics and the metrics are the ones that contained values. And usually all I have to do in Harris, go and check the values to see if they’re correct. Words. Words is a number. I want that. The aggregation, I want it to be a sum because anytime I’m looking at the words I want the total words, um, rates, um, that’s a number. But is it, it’s actually a currency. So I’m going to change this number to currency and I’m going to change it to USD that on here and once again, come in and change that to some.

It’s running pretty slow. I apologize for that. See the dates are dimensions. I’m on time number. Yeah, we’ll just leave that as number because if you remember that was the column with just ones and Zeros. But as some though and costs. This is another currency. So we’re gonna change this to currency, US dollars and something cool

and cool. Now I’m going to add this to report. Now one thing I can do it, I can always go back and change this stuff once I’ve actually added it to the report and that’s fine. I can do that. It’s just easier to do it on the front end. Now I can also add fields here. Maybe I want to add calculated fields. So I want a field that says you know the cost over time, like how much am I spending per week? There’s a fancy way to add fields here. That’s definitely. Well I don’t know how to do it very well. So that means to me, I would call it advanced, that there might be people listening and saying that’s not an advanced, that’s easy, but it’s kind of a scripting language that I don’t know how to speak. So I haven’t learned that yet. I haven’t taught myself yet. Um, but going back to am I intimidated? But no, going back to what we were saying earlier, there is a way to do this. All of this stuff is that I’m showing you today. No one showed me how to do it. I’m self taught. I got on Google and I said, Google, how do I do this? And I’ve learned it. So if I can do that, you can definitely do it too. For now, I’m just going to add this to report. Be Respectful of time here at the report.

I think there’s going to give me this beautiful full blank canvas and it has my data source over here and up here in this row have all my different types of charts and graphs I can add. And I’m just going to start with the bar chart. I find that 90 percent of the time I’m using bar charts, pie charts, maybe line graphs if I’m showing something over time and it’s almost like bar chart and I’m going to that bar chart like that. And Google’s going to guess what I want to see visualized in that bar chart. So it’s going to select something. Let’s see what a selected words and project it looks like. So it’s showing me word count by project and you see that over here. If I select this graph, which is already selected, that over here is in the, um, that’s what’s selected over here. So I have did range, dimension, a dimension, project name and metric is words. Now I can change this, I can, maybe I want to see it by content type. Maybe I want to see if I both. I can have two dimensions. So if I add two dimensions, let’s see what that shows me.

Oh, okay. So I have marketing over here, Ui over here and then I have. Each project is a different color. So that’s Kinda cool. Um, maybe I want to add that because that doesn’t really make sense to me. Maybe I just want to show it by content type so I can delete over here on the rates. I can delete the, the project name and then I just get marketing in the Ui. I’m so very simple bar graph. Um, I can also do pie charts. Always popular. The Pie chart, just click the pie chart and I drag what shape I want it to be. And here we go. So here we have same thing words, but this gives me the breakdown of works by project. So that’s kind of cool. I’m just going to leave that their lips and now I want to show you. Um, so I got my dashboards. They don’t look pretty but I can totally make them look pretty. I can select this year and instead of on the data I can go to style over here.

I do apologize. It’s going slow. It doesn’t want to change the style. There we go. I can make it horizontal. I can change. Change the colors. This is very important. If you have company branded colors, perhaps you can actually get the exact color. It’s like I can go in here and do a custom color and I can make it any color I want because I know that wonderful nimsy yellow is FFC or if there zero and I got an MC yellow bar graph there, so all sorts of different options in here. I, I can, um, create titles for my graphs if I go up here to this text field in the top. And just like with the graphs, I drag it, it creates a text box so I can take this. Okay. Waiting for it.

Doesn’t want to create a text box. There we go. This is a bar graph. Once again, I can go over here and change the styles, like center it, I can change the font size, make it super big, different colors, you name it. Once everything’s on here, I can, I can select things, I can move them around on my dashboard. I can change the size of the dashboard if I want it bigger, if I want it smaller, I can do all these different things and it’s really cool. You can really make a cool dashboard. I can. One thing I like here, if you’re worried, if you want something that’s really attractive as you can add a picture. So image. This is great for adding company logos for example, and I can select a file and let’s see where this takes me. I’ll just add the first picture.

I can’t. Oh, it takes me to my little folder here. So let’s just add to this picture. You can pretend this is a company logo and I can put that up there in the corner. And last thing I’m going to show you because we’re running short on time. Here is this filter option care here and I can create a filter as soon as it loads. It’s going to show me over here. It’s project names so I can filter by project name. I can create time filters, timeshares, filters like you like you saw. Um, so really this is how I created this sample dashboard that we started off with, which I’m going to bring back up here in a moment

once it looks,

so just sample dashboard that I created here as a which one is it, like it’s this one sample task where I created, I created and a little under an hour.

Um,

so that just shows you how simple this can be. Come now, if it took me longer than that, there is a learning curve with data studio. I’m not gonna lie to you there. There is a learning curve. I spent a lot of time asking Google for favors and for help. Um, but now it’s to the point where I see I created this in under an hour in it including formatting and everything. So that is the power of this. And if I was managing projects, I could share this with my vendors or my clients and I can go right here to share this report. I can set permissions to see who has access to it, to people outside of my company have access to it. If they have edit access or just view access, says sharing is unavailable at this time, I wonder why. Trust me though. I can share it.

I can get a link to it that I can send people and when they click that link they’ll see this exceptional. It’ll bring up this page and they can bookmark this and always have their data. The last thing I’m going to show you though is this embed option here and I can embed this dashboard and pretty much anywhere that takes html because it’s just the basic iframe html code here so I can set my dimensions. I can copy it to clipboard and I’m going to go over to [inaudible] dot com here because I happen to manage this website so I have access to it and I’m going to put this on this page. This is the page you’re probably familiar with it. You registered from this page. I use a builder in wordpress to manage this website so we could do it from the back end. I’m just going to do it from the builder here, um, because that’s, that’s easiest for me and I’m going to. Let’s see here, I’m going to add a row here, I’ll just duplicate this row, get rid of that, and just add a text plain text field here. Basically any, anything that I can paste html into, I’m going to paste this html and they’re done.

I don’t know. Save that and my clothes, my builder here. So this is, this is very useful if you’re wanting to share your data in a very public way or put it on a website somewhere that can be accessed by people. And

as you can see here now, this is my life page. If you go back to the registration page for this right now, you will see the super awesome demo dashboard and hopefully it will load quicker for you then it’s loading for me because you won’t be streaming to multiple channels at the same time, sucking up your bandwidth. So this has been a very, very high level overview of um, well I hope not too high level overview. I think we got into the weeds a little bit. Um, my intent wasn’t to showing you exactly how to do everything but to show you what can be done. So with that, um, I want to go back to care transition time and just cover it like things that I want you to really take away from this or that. I hope you can take away what you, I hope these are the things that you take away from this presentation. And firstly, project manager should be good with data. And in my experience, this is what separates the good pms from the really good or the great pms. I think I said that the other day on an info drop and why? Because

the machines are coming to take our jobs. Big Scary. That’s what everyone’s talking about, right? And not only we do, we need to know how to be better than the machines. We need to know how to work with the machines, whether we like it or not. And in order to work with the machines, we need to speak the language of the machines and the language that the machines speak is data. So project managers need to know how to collect, maintain, and visualize data. They need to know how to translate meaningful stories from data that can be explained and understood by other human beings. And um, that’s not, I feel confident. I don’t think that should be a controversial statement. Project managers need to be here with data, which means if you’re a project manager, if you’re an account manager, if you’re really, if you’re anybody, learn how to use excel, learned how to use Google sheets, learn how to use something open office, I don’t know, but really understand some, some basic formulas.

So like some if then formulas of v lookup index formulas are awesome. Um, some ifs, all of these different formulas are going to help you really better understand your data. So at least learn how to use V lookup. And if formulas, those are my two I’m going to add in there. And if you don’t know how to do something, please, please, please take it from me. It can be done always. It can always be done. There is, there is a way excel, google sheets, Google data studio. These are very powerful tools. They have a lot of features in them and you might need to ask Google or if you’re a Microsoft, we’ve asked Bang, right? How do I look? Example formulas, for example, v look up formulas, tutorials. There’s all sorts of tutorials. There’s all sorts of very, very smart, very nerdy people out there that spend their time reading tutorials on the Internet to help people like you and to help people like me.

That’s how I learned it. I did not learn this in college. I did not learn this from my boss. I did not learn it from my coworker and learned it from Google. Thank you. Google. So the last thing, most important, don’t be a data hall like focus on data. That’s actually, when I say data, I mean a key performance indicators, KPI’s, track kpis that are actually going to help you make better business decisions or help your vendors make better business decisions. Help your clients make better decisions. Don’t track data just for the sake of tracking data. I’ve seen, I’ve seen this happen so many times, people and I’ve been guilty of it. I learned a fancy, cool new tool like data studio and it’s I’m infatuated with it and I want to present all the data, all the data, all the time, and there’s always a cost to tracking data and maintaining data and whether that’s a human input or someone having to write an automation or a script to pull that data.

So really focus on the kpis that are actually going to give you meaningful information about your business, about your program, about your project. And with that I, I, I, I do believe we’re out of time, which I was hoping to have some time for questions, but I don’t think we do at 8:56 right now. So what I’m going to ask you to do is if you’re logging in on one of the platforms that supports comments or questions, then please, if you have any questions, please go ahead and leave them in the comments and I will get back to those either in the comments myself. Maybe what we can do is do a followup video, like a common response video that could be fun while you’re there. If you’re logging in from youtube or from our facebook page, please make sure to like and subscribe to our page.

If you subscribe to our facebook or our youtube channel, you will get notifications of upcoming webinars. Cool stuff that we put out there, and if I. I’m very passionate about this. Just to close. I’m very passionate about this. If you’re passionate about it to or want to talk more, I’m always down. My name is Tucker Johnson. My email address is tucker at [inaudible] dot com. You can contact me at that email address. You can get me on twitter, fat mother Tucker, facebook, Linkedin, you name it. Likewise with Nimsy. If you’d like more information about how nimsy publishes research for the language services industry, how you can get access to that research. How you can get access to an MCS. I’m consulting packages unlimited consulting packages. Please shoot us an email at info at [inaudible] dot com or visit our website www dot [inaudible] dot com. So that’s it for my.

My gratuitous plugging. I’m going to let you go. I will end by saying thank you very much for joining us today. Our next Webinar is going to be on July 25th. Uh, we’re going to talk about part two of our two part series on soft skills for project managers where I will be joined by my friend and colleague, Carolyn Lee from Iasi language solutions is going to be great. Go over, register now and I hope you found something useful from this webinar today. I hope to hear from a stone and I thank you very much for your time. And with that, I’m signing off.